See the ever valuable study of R.A. Jairazbhoy, Oriental Infl uences in Western Art, London 1965. For the lasting success of pseudo-cuphic motives in early modern art, particularly in Italian Renaissance, see M.V. Fontana, L’infl usso dell’arte islamica in Italia, in Eredità dell’Islam. Arte islamica in Italia, Catalog of exhibition, edited by G. Curatola, Milano Visual effects and visual infection in Islamic and Byzantine champleve` sculpture 1993, pp. 455-476; more recently, see the specific essay of R.E. Mack, M. Zakariya, The Pseudo-Arabic on Andrea del Verrocchio’s David, in Artibus et Historiae 60 (30) (2009), pp. 157-172.

The main reference here is to the so-called “contagion model” as developed specially by the anthropologist Dan Sperber (Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach, Oxford 1996) to explain the complexities of social and cognitive flows of cultural representations. From our point of view Sperber’s naturalistic epidemiological account is preferable to apparently analogous theories, rigidly based on Darwinian mechanisms, such as the well-known “Memetics” put forward by Richard Dawkins (Th e Selfi sh Gene, Oxford 1976), for Sperber’s model is transformational more than replicational. Other authors that used and popularized the viral and epidemic metaphors for cultural phenomena are Malcolm Gladwell (Th e Tipping Point, New York 2000) and Aaron Lynch (Th ought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, New York 1996). Ironically, but perhaps not so surprisingly, Gladwell’s book never cites Dawkins and Sperber, and Lynch explicitly claims in his preface he “independently reinvented this theory of self-propagating ideas”. One may think that, by and large, the “independent convergence model” is valued as personally preferable even by the “contagion theorists”!

Within Art History the “structural hypothesis” is typical of several formalistic theories, the otherwise great differences notwithstanding, and we can fi nd similar positions in so diff erent scholars as Jurgis Baltrušaitis (Le Moyen Âge fantastique. Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique, Paris 1972, pp. 129-134) and Meyer Schapiro (On some problems in the semiotics of visual arts: fi eld and vehicle in image-signs, in Semiotica 1 (1969), pp. 223-242). Also those approaches interested in psychology of perception draw heavily on the idea of structural visual laws organizing pictorial field and production. An eminent example is the work of R. Arnheim, Art and Perception: a Psychology of the Creative Eye, 1954.Needless to say, the perceptualist approach was no less heavily criticized by authors with historicist, semiotics or poststructural sympathies.

A balanced assessment of what we called “epidemiological” and “structural” options is to be found, for example, in E. Gombrich, The Sense of Order. A Study in Psychology of Decorative Art, London 1979, and in Grabar, The Mediation cit., passim. Both Gombrich and Grabar acknowledge a wide space for compromise solutions.

M. Canard, Les relations politiques et sociales entre Byzance et les Arabes, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964), pp. 35-55; see also: L.A. Hunt, Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam, Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean, London 1998, vol. I-II. More recently, a conference held in Thessaloniki (Byzantium and the Arab World, december 2011) and two exhibitions (Byzantium and the Arabs, Th essaloniki, Museum of Byzantine Culture, October 2011-January 2012; Byzantium and Islam. Age of Transition. 7th-9th Century, New York, Metropolitan Museum, March-July, 2012) have been devoted to the relationships between Byzantium and Islam.

Arab letters alim and alef bound together are widely used in Byzantine art for decorative purposes. See the recent essay by Valentina Cantone on some manuscripts of Macedonian period: V. Cantone, The Problem of the Eastern Influences on Byzantine Art During the Macedonian Renaissance: Some Illuminated Manuscripts from the National Library of Greece and the National Library of Venice, in Actual Problems of Th eory and History of Art. Collection of articles, edited by S. Maltseva, E. Stanyukovich-Denisova, I, St. Petersburg 2011, pp. 33-38. I’m at present working, together with Dr. Cantone, on a research project of systematic survey of ornamental motives in Byzantine sculpture and manuscript illumination, between the 9th and the 11th centuries. The project aims at defining a taxonomic catalogue of formal schemes and units shared by different artistic techniques, and at reconstructing, if possible, the material “epidemic” ways through which such motives spread out.

The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A. D. 843-1261, edited by H.C. Evans, W.D. Wixom, New York 1997, p. 410. See also the inscription on the box now in the Museo-Biblioteca de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, Léon: ibid., p. 409.

K. Reynolds Brawn, cat. 21, Vaso di vetro dorato, in Tesoro di San Marco, Milano 1986, pp. 189-191; A. Cutler, The Mythological Bowl in the Treasury of San Marco at Venice, in Imagery and Ideology in Byzantine Art, London 1999, pp. 235-254. In the Treasury of San Marco see also the splendid rock crystal bowl with a cuphic inscription, Tesoro di San Marco cit., pp. 145-146, n. 55.

See infra, note 2. For a more recent point of view, cfr. Eff ects of the Foreign Infl uence in A.P. Kazhdan, A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelft h Centuries, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1985, pp. 180-183.